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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Place your bets now, everyone: what do we think the external social will be for this turn?

I'm putting my metaphorical money on getting approached by the Colleges for some sort of deal given the books we got from the Library of Mournings last turn.
 
Boney said:
Voting closed, writing has begun.
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This vote was so lopsided that any complaint should be obviated. Even the lowest still winning option got ~58% support while the option right after got less than 24%. In other words, more than half of the players wanted exactly this outcome and less than a quarter could agree on any other thing.
 
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Parabola said:
Place your bets now, everyone: what do we think the external social will be for this turn?

I'm putting my metaphorical money on getting approached by the Colleges for some sort of deal given the books we got from the Library of Mournings last turn.
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It might be House Fanpatar contacting us regarding payment for the Schadenweg fog road, the only other thing I can think of is Lathruai's relatives and/or close friends and/or lover(s) getting in contact with us in attempt to learn her fate, possibly looking to obtain the original copy of the notes we bought in order to examine it for details that weren't included in our papers as we presumably didn't transcribe them in their entirety, it's probably an unlikely possibility but we've been surprised before and I would appreciate reading about it and getting some level of closure regarding Lathruai's story via those who care about her trying to find out her fate even if it probably won't happen.
 
redpotato4 said:
I could see a Carved Rune if you're going for full non-wizard and/or non-Runesmith Waystone, but the Foundation will require a Light Wizard and the Runic Inductor a Runesmith anyway so may as well get a Dwarven Rune. And the Foundation runs into a bit of a political problem with the creation of Dhar.

But mostly I'm of the opinion that we don't really need to make a super cheap version of the Waystone. In terms of material cost the current one is pretty low already, and its not like the Network is only a few years from falling apart so we don't need it particularly fast. Make a leyline-only one with maybe a few tweaks that we can put in most places and that can be the standard one, while the current one if for the real nasty places.

So it could be:
[ ] [CAPSTONE] Collegiate Fascis- replaces High Mages with 8 different Wind enchanters, to ease up on that supply some
[ ] [RUNE] Dwarven- the best
[ ] [STORAGE] Reverse-engineered- difficulty and requirements will go down in time
[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord- only Wind based and the Lights seem to have understood this way better than the Grey Lords thought they would
[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline

No High Magic required:
[ ] [CAPSTONE] Collegiate Fascis
[ ] [RUNE] Dwarven
[ ] [STORAGE] [Expensive] Runed
[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline

Or if you if want it to simply be Wind based so that the Empire could make it on their own:
[ ] [CAPSTONE] Collegiate Fascis
[ ] [RUNE] Wizard
[ ] [STORAGE] [Expensive] Enchanted
[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline
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Agreed. With even Sylvania and Kislev able to afford the current Waystones, I don't see the point in making an even cheaper model. Who would we even sell them to, the Border Princes?
 
Parabola said:
Place your bets now, everyone: what do we think the external social will be for this turn?

I'm putting my metaphorical money on getting approached by the Colleges for some sort of deal given the books we got from the Library of Mournings last turn.
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Teclis himself shows up to ask for his Orbs back. "I only meant to let you guys borrow them, but then you kids seemed so excited about your battle altars that taking them away would feel bad."
 
WestOrEast said:
Who would we even sell them to, the Border Princes?
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Theoretically Ulthuan might be interested in that, if they want more magic they might go up to a Border Prince and say "hey, if you let us install a Waystone here we'll pay you [an amount that's a pittance to them but significant to a struggling Border Prince polity], it won't have any negative effects and will even reduce the chance of horrible magical stuff happening in the area, what do you say?" and if someone takes over the area while work is in progress they could say "hey, if you let us continue our work without disruption we'll give you [a smaller amount that's also a pittance but still significant to a Border Prince who just spent money in order to win a war and annex territory and is looking for some way to recoup that investment] and it'll have no negative effects and will reduce the amount of bad magical stuff nearby, what do you say?". But I get the impression that they're only interested in the Waystone network as a way to skim excess magic off of for their own use and make sure that the rest of the world doesn't turn to shit in such a way that it becomes their problem and as long as there's enough magic being drained from the rest of the planet to fulfill those two criteria they don't care, the current Waystone network even without the Waystone Project sufficed so I doubt they'd pay for the construction of additional Waystones even if they are cheap especially when other polities are building Waystones that send magic towards the vortex for free, the only reason they helped the Waystone Project was to make sure we didn't screw up the network and because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, if they make a minor investment in the Project now by giving us the way to make leylines they don't have to spend resources combatting the gradual degradation of the network or have to spend effort in the future reexpanding it if it degrades to the point that there isn't enough magic for them to make use of or the world's ambient magic levels begin to rise to the point it becomes Ulthuan's problem.
 
WestOrEast said:
Agreed. With even Sylvania and Kislev able to afford the current Waystones, I don't see the point in making an even cheaper model. Who would we even sell them to, the Border Princes?
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Cheaper Waystones would be for other use cases.

For example, say we made a much cheaper mobile riverine Waystone, you could build a dozen of them and surge them to locations that need quickly purifying, such as Praag or Mordheim, or the Black Water, massively speeding up the process.

You could also deploy them into important locations when a Storm of Magic passes over them.
 
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Alratan said:
Cheaper Waystones would be for other use cases.

For example, say we made a much cheaper mobile riverine Waystone, you could build a dozen of them and surge them to locations that need quickly purifying, such as Praag or Mordheim, or the Black Water, massively speeding up the process.

You could also deploy them into important locations when a Storm of Magic passes over them.
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So just carpet an area with inferior but cheaper Waystones feeding into a superior design at such close proximity they eat into each others efficiency but ultimately make a corrupt area noncorrupt as fast as possible? I can see that, that might be useful in the highly corrupted areas like you mentioned already as well as for pushing back the Chaos Wastes in as short a time frame as possible. I'm reminded of this comment from Boney originally made regarding tributary deployment,
Boney said:
The 'standard' deployment would be eight tributaries per Waystone with each tributary being right on the horizon from the Waystone, but that assumes a flat featureless plain that geography rarely cooperates with and the Empire's topographical surveying techniques struggle with. Up to 48-to-1 is doable for areas that don't have high background magic levels, while places like Praag can benefit from just blanketing the area with Waystones and then throwing in tributaries anyway until the walls stop bleeding.
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guyfromtheplace1 said:
But could it detect Waaaghs? Possibly by using bits of Orc or Goblin-bone components to detect the little waaagh and big waaagh?
Because in tiny villages that would be an amazingly useful use, with the primary threats to those being beastmen or greenskins, and greenskins being constantly linked to a magical field that signals when they're going to attack.
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Parabola said:
I've asked Boney about this before and the answer was no, because Waaagh energies are not ambient or affected by the Winds. Because of this, and because Waaagh energies are present around lots of greenskins and particularly greenskin shamans (which are rare), the Colleges haven't exactly gotten around to figuring out which physical materials (if any) resonate with Waaagh energies.

Also, Greenskins may sometimes be cunning but they're not exactly subtle. Any sufficiently large amounts of Waaagh are probably less noticeable than the Greenskin forces that accompany them. As such, Waaagh-scopes are not likely to take off like Seviroscopes might one day.
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From the time I brought this up, the current blocking issue is finding safe materials that react to the waaagh:
LawsOfRobotics said:
Questions for Boney:
  1. Is it a viable idea for us to try and build a system to detect Waaaghs forming in time to either intervene or evacuate anything in it's path?
  2. Could we take an action to see if Barak Varr would be interested in hiring WEB-MAT to build such a system?
  3. If so would that be a personal action under Foreign Relations or would it be a WEB-MAT action?
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Boney said:
Waaagh Magic generally reacts with Waaagh Magic and greenskins and not much else. There's no readily apparent automatable Teclisean method for spotting it that Mathilde can currently think of. The only avenues to start experimentation without delving full on into wielding Waaagh Magic herself would be to experiment with various types of greenskin-derived fungus to see if there's any that visibly react to Waaagh energies that also won't result in a new bloom of greenskins in the surrounding area, and that's got 'first five minutes of a post-apocalypse movie' written all over it. If such a thing could be built and was proven to be safe, then pretty much every border fort and watchtower on the continent would want one.
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LawsOfRobotics said:
What I'm getting from this is that we should create a new tower for this experimentation and give it a name that spells out UMBRELLA.
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For a while now I have been thinking that the rewards we will we get for the Morbs may come in the form of a boon from each of the colleges, similar to the Gold college boon we got for the Skaven research items. We will see if that is actually the case very soon, but if it is then I have been thinking the boon we ask for from the Jade college would be to develop a safe Waaagh reactive mushroom for us to make an Early Waaaghning System.
 
Cheaper alone (as opposed to 'cheaper with other benefits' like the proposed mobile waystones) also isn't so much "for people who can't afford the current ones" as it is "for those who already can afford the current ones, used on more and more marginal land."

Let us posit a time when Kislev is actively expanding into Norsca or the Steppe, but still with opposition. Some fraction of any waystones put up ARE going to get torn down by Nosrcans or Kurgan, because now it's an active symbol of encroachment into their lands. Kislev is gonna be WAY more happy to just blanket the territory they're trying to claim with waystones if they're "cheap and replacable" instead of just sticking them in the most defended hardpoints.
 
Cheap waystones will also help with the pitch to other electors. Like Sylvania and mordheim are obviously bad magic and need to be fixed, but most of the other problems way stones could fix will need quite a few way stones in very out of the way places and some electors might be short sighted enough to not want to invest the money to solve that problem right now cause they have bigger current problems and need all their funds.

Cheaper waystones are always going to be more politically viable. Especially when they're already going to require a lot of money to finance the battles they'll produce.
 
NexusEye said:
So just carpet an area with inferior but cheaper Waystones feeding into a superior design at such close proximity they eat into each others efficiency but ultimately make a corrupt area noncorrupt as fast as possible? I can see that, that might be useful in the highly corrupted areas like you mentioned already as well as for pushing back the Chaos Wastes in as short a time frame as possible. I'm reminded of this comment from Boney originally made regarding tributary deployment,
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Basically yes, although for riverine only Waystones that means a Nexus down (or up, for riverine spirit Waystones) stream.

reignonyrparade said:
Cheaper alone (as opposed to 'cheaper with other benefits' like the proposed mobile waystones) also isn't so much "for people who can't afford the current ones" as it is "for those who already can afford the current ones, used on more and more marginal land."

Let us posit a time when Kislev is actively expanding into Norsca or the Steppe, but still with opposition. Some fraction of any waystones put up ARE going to get torn down by Nosrcans or Kurgan, because now it's an active symbol of encroachment into their lands. Kislev is gonna be WAY more happy to just blanket the territory they're trying to claim with waystones if they're "cheap and replacable" instead of just sticking them in the most defended hardpoints.
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It's worth remembering that according to the maps, the Empire only controls a minority of the territory inside their internal borders. Much of the Empire is an archipelago of islands of cleared land in a vast ocean of forests. Those forests are the territory of Beastmen and Greenskins. If the Empire wants to cleanse them it may want cheap and replaceable Waystones in the same way.
 
Parabola said:
Place your bets now, everyone: what do we think the external social will be for this turn?

I'm putting my metaphorical money on getting approached by the Colleges for some sort of deal given the books we got from the Library of Mournings last turn.
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I don't expect it, but I'm hoping for somebody from Bretonnia to give us more reason to go there soon, particularly checking if the Lady is a Daughter of Ranald.
 
Parabola said:
Place your bets now, everyone: what do we think the external social will be for this turn?

I'm putting my metaphorical money on getting approached by the Colleges for some sort of deal given the books we got from the Library of Mournings last turn.
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Von Drakem mugs us for AV in Altdorf alley so that she can pour it on dead god dust.
 
Alratan said:
Basically yes, although for riverine only Waystones that means a Nexus down (or up, for riverine spirit Waystones) stream.
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Technically we don't need a Nexus down(or up)stream, as long as the riverine Waystone is temporarily connected to the network through normal leylines long enough to use it as an intermediary node to link up all the cheap Waystones to the riverine Waystones it doesn't matter if it gets disconnected and there's no Nexus down(or up)stream, all the magic will flow into the ocean, either through the water in the case of the Winds or underground following the river's path for Dhar. It won't end up in the Great Vortex but it will go from someplace people care about (wherever we're putting the Waystones) to somewhere nobody but Manann's followers care about (the middle of the ocean) and while eventually that might eventually lead to oceanic magic levels rising enough to have negative consequences that's officially Somebody Else's Problem and that somebody else is likely to be centuries if not millennia in the future relative to now. If we can implement the Waystone Project now they can implement the Waystone Project But For The Ocean in the year 3XXX IC or whatever, assuming K8P hasn't fallen our library should still have all our old notes on how we did Waystones in the first place.
 
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It definitely looks like the thread has at least one or two more turns of Waystone project in it which I am glad to see since the stone we have right now is very specialized, it is absolutely great if what you want to do is drive a stake into the heart of evil, less so if you want to just provide more coverage for an overall improvement in quality of life.
 
DragonParadox said:
It definitely looks like the thread has at least one or two more turns of Waystone project in it which I am glad to see since the stone we have right now is very specialized, it is absolutely great if what you want to do is drive a stake into the heart of evil, less so if you want to just provide more coverage for an overall improvement in quality of life.
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It is not specialised. The New Waystone is excellent at every task a Waystone can be put to. It is just expensive to make.

People don't want a Waystone that does something else or does something better. They just want one that can be mass produced more easily.
Which I find kinda odd as apparently we have no problem kicking out a hundred or more in a year or two and still have unused capacity in the bottleneck.
 
Angelform said:
It is not specialised. The New Waystone is excellent at every task a Waystone can be put to. It is just expensive to make.

People don't want a Waystone that does something else or does something better. They just want one that can be mass produced more easily.
Which I find kinda odd as apparently we have no problem kicking out a hundred or more in a year or two and still have unused capacity in the bottleneck.
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It is specialized in at least one way, it can do both Riverine and Leyline transmission which means that if you ever use it in a place where it is not hooked up to both you have an excess part in there, the mark of using something specialized for a generalized role.
 
DragonParadox said:
It is specialized in at least one way, it can do both Riverine and Leyline transmission which means that if you ever use it in a place where it is not hooked up to both you have an excess part in there, the mark of using something specialized for a generalized role.
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That's, like, opposite of specialized.
It is a generic waystone with functions that not all will necessarily be used in every situation.
 
It may take more then one or two turns if we want to try to research Nexuses too, though that's only needed if we either want to make the current parts more secure, or want to push into truly deep new lands (running Chaos out of Norsca would be nice, but it will take far more then one new nexus and a few hundred new waystones).
 
Xexilf said:
It may take more then one or two turns if we want to try to research Nexuses too, though that's only needed if we either want to make the current parts more secure, or want to push into truly deep new lands (running Chaos out of Norsca would be nice, but it will take far more then one new nexus and a few hundred new waystones).
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We are at present a single Nexus away from the whole of the Old World becoming Chaos Wastes and we do not know how many of those Monoliths the High Elves have. I'd say Nexuses are for more than pushing into deep Chaos lands.
 
Copperscale said:
And Mathilde would say yes, as long as she can watch.
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I've never really been clear on it, but to me the sacrifice of divine imprints meant that Mathilde gave up that branch of research forever. Maybe not literally, but the sacrifice (and accord forged by it) seems to be to count on good faith (snerk).

Then again, i guess Elspeth would not be pouring it on god artifact, she would be pouring it on god, so thats clearly different right?
 
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